Around and About (2003)

Rather than one weird trip, over the next few months I experienced quite a few random moments in different places…

Korea

I went to a meeting in Seoul recently where the customer had an office above a shopping centre.  Nothing too untoward in this (we were there early so we wandered up via the TV section, if you ever want to buy a cinema-sized plasma home TV unit, Korea’s the place, I had to be dragged out of the shop to go to the meeting…) except for in the car park below the centre.  Seoul like many places is short of car parking, so they have an interesting strategy there; by putting cars on ramps, and then raising them up in the air with another car underneath, they can better use their space.  By then shuffling them around within set spaces, they can fit six cars in what would normally be four spaces.

This is all very well, but it does mean that it is a bit more complicated than just parking the car yourself.  You drive in and have to be herded into a set space by a car park attendant, meaning they have more attendants than most car parks. 

Again not a problem, but a factor of Asia is that officialdom always demands a uniform, and this applies even down to the level of car park attendant.  But who on earth designed the uniforms for these attendants I cannot fathom, because nowhere else were people dressed like this: pink jackets, with black leather boots, topped off with silver lame cowboy hats.  We had to blink twice to make sure that we were in a shopping centre and not a gay nightclub; although the pink – silver combo might have been a bit too much even for there. 

I didn’t see the doorman dressed as a Red Indian, or any police motorcyclists hanging around, but even so I would expect the 7th member of the Village People to be the Car Valet - “Young Man, there’s a space you can go…”

Ningxia, China

A while back I went as part of a group of 10 bankers & traders to visit a customer in the Ningxia province, which is in a remote part of Central China.  We spent two days there (Sunday and Monday, Sunday meetings – brilliant), with a dinner on the evening in between.

The town we were in was just a few thousand people, and basically it was only there because of the plant that we were visiting.  Everyone who lived in the town worked at the plant or was related to someone who did…and that was about it.  Oh apart from some random Russian soldiers that we met also, we never did quite work out what they were doing there.  There is no hotel in the town, just the plant’s own ‘Guest House’; I forget what star rating it had.

So we have dinner on the Sunday night with the customer, and as per usual the customer brings out their one employee who drinks like a fish, so the whole thing degenerates into a drinking session with the local Golden Camel equivalent.  This makes for a fairly heavy night, with the one relief being that at 9.30 the customers have had enough and decide to go home.

There we are in this tiny town in Ningxia at 9.30 on Sunday night, naturally we decide to go out to try find some nightlife.  We wander into the town ‘centre’ and find that actually there is something going on; there is an informal bar, with around a dozen outdoor pool tables.  This is cool, so we buy a few beers, and between us start playing.

I am playing on one table, when I get challenged to a game.  I turn to see that the guy asking me is actually in a wheelchair, but the confident nature of his challenge is such that I reckon he must be the local town Champion, who wants to try and beat the visiting Westerner.  So in the name of good manners, I agree to play.

Now considering the bravado of his challenge, I am expecting this guy to be really good…but he’s not.  In fact, because he is in the chair, he can barely reach the table.   To hit a ball on the other side, he has to use one hand and just try and poke it without really seeing what he is hitting.  So I should be able to beat him easily, but unfortunately for me, the fresh air / Chinese Liquor combination has affected my co-ordination, and I am playing useless as well.

So there we are, a guy who can’t reach the table against a drunken Englishman, you can imagine it wasn’t the best game of pool that the world had ever seen.  And yet, all the local Chinese playing on the other tables all put down their cues and came to watch.  Next thing I know the crowd is three-deep all round the table and every shot is being cheered, despite the fact that every shot from both of us invariably misses.  This goes on for three frames and no-one seems to get bored of watching the two of us hammer the balls round the table without getting anywhere near the pockets.  Maybe there were some side bets going on, but it seemed to be the most popular place to be in the town that night.

And it wasn’t even like there was nothing else to do – when I later got back to the “Guest House”, they might not have had clean running water, but they did have the Arsenal game live on satellite.

My opponent must also still be telling the story of the pool game, but with a different slant – he actually beat me 2-1.  And what I did I get from Ningxia for my troubles?  Food poisoning.  Food poisoning in rural China with not a proper toilet in sight…oh the horror….

Shanghai

Shanghai more than any other Chinese city that I have been to is a place where you can lose yourself for a minute and think you are in Europe or the West generally; huge skyscrapers, designer shops, and a Starbucks on every corner.  But the Chinese essence of the place is only momentarily lost, you only have to try to cross the road to remember where you are.  The traffic is actually quite impressive, with co-ordination and timing that would put the Red Arrows to shame, as the bikes go through red lights and find gaps in the side-on traffic to weave their way through without the shame of actually having to slow down.

Not only is crossing the road is a life-threatening experience, but then also sometimes so is walking on the pavement.  In Shanghai for the weekend, I was walking down the street minding my own business, when I hear a car hooting behind me.  I turn and dive for cover as a taxi, bored with the traffic jam, drove straight down the pavement towards me, scattering pedestrians as it went.  It was like something out of a car chase from Starsky & Hutch, made even more so when that evening I met a (Chinese) bloke dressed like Huggy Bear.

Road-side food is a very Asian concept; Hong Kong is a bit too conscientious, but China, like Thailand and Singapore encourages the road-side hawkers.  A particular Asian delicacy is ‘meat on a stick’, which can be found pretty much anywhere.  You can buy the long kebab-style meat on a stick, the sausage-shaped meat on the stick, the miscellaneous squashed-flat meat on a stick, or the particular speciality, the dried impaled fish on a stick.  Don’t even think of asking what meat it is, just say thank you and move on.  If you’ve been to China and you haven’t had meat on a stick then you just haven’t been to China.

After one particularly refreshing stick, I also risked buying an ice cream from a strangely-transported-from-Southend Mr Whippy ice cream van.  The ice cream was fine and I was walking along enjoying it, when a Chinese girl ran up and stood in front of me.  Her boyfriend pointed a camera at her, then she ducked out of the way.  He took a photo of me eating an ice cream, they both laughed, and ran off while I stood there completely bemused.  They could at least have offered me some royalties….

My final random moment was one afternoon when I decided to take a boat tour down the river.  It’s always a stock tourist thing to do, so I went down to the river and signed up, being told that the next boat left in 20 minutes. 

I waited until the allotted time, when I was asked to follow the tour group and was shown …a bus.  Everyone was expected to get in the bus and drive to the loading point, despite the fact that the ticket office was right on the water in the main port area.  And the bus, it had to be said, had seen better days.  It had tattered curtains, ripped seats, no lights, stank of cigarette smoke, and shuddered and jolted its way down the road like it was on its last legs.  We were driven from the pier up the road to a small naval dock, where we managed to disembark the bus & find the boat, acknowledging the surprised Chinese sailors walking the other way.

The boat trip then took us back down the river…to the pier where we had originally started…turned round and came back again, covering less than a mile in either direction.  In addition to looking at the buildings we had already seen from both the pier and through the murky windows of the bus, we were treated to a bilingual commentary most of which involved complaining about the British who used to live in Shanghai and how life was much better now they’d all gone.  After an hour of this we were back at the naval base, and got back on the magic bus to be driven back to the pier where we had started, so seeing the same stretch of buildings for about the fourth time in 60 minutes.  Well at least they gave us a free drink.